Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms
[ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT READ AT SOURCE at a public repository: the abstract, the results, the figure legends and the competing-interests statement were read, and THE SUPPLEMENTARY TABLES WERE NOT READ] Skiles, M., Yang, E., Reshef, O., Robalino Munoz, D., Cintron, D., Lind, M. L., Rush, A., Perez Calleja, P., Nerenberg, R., Armani, A., Faust, K., & Kumar, M. (2022). 'Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms.' Nature Sustainability 5, 149-156. doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2, online December 2021, in the February 2022 issue. SKILES FIRST AUTHOR, Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, confirmed on the manuscript byline. COMPETING INTERESTS DECLARED IN THE MANUSCRIPT AND MANDATORY IN ANY CITATION: several co-authors were organisers of the conferences analysed. THE MEASURED ACCESS CASE. Natural experiment: science and engineering conferences that moved online in 2020, compared with their own in-person editions from 2015 to 2019, on cost, gender, career stage and geographic location. ATTENDANCE: 'the audiences were approximately 40% to 120% larger than the historical average for IPCs'. COST AS THE PROPOSED MECHANISM: compared with United States attendees, 'the average researcher from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania paid between 90% to 210% more to attend NAMS IPCs', and the cost of attendance was 'on average between 80% to 250% of their country's annual per capita gross domestic product, compared to approximately 3% of per capita GDP for US participants'. TIME ZONES DECIDE WHO GAINS, AND THIS IS THE SHARPEST DETAIL: the 2020 virtual conference ran synchronous live talks in a United States time zone, and 'attendance from Europe and the Middle East increased by 102% and 76%, respectively, when compared to the 2015-2019 NAMS IPC average', while attendance from Asia, where sessions fell around or past midnight local time, did not rise. GENDER: women made up larger fractions of delegations at the 2020 virtual conferences than at the in-person ones, with a larger percentage increase for female than male scientists at two conferences, and after the 2020 conference was announced as virtual, 37 per cent of submitted abstracts came from female researchers. CAREER STAGE: the 2020 virtual conference was attended by substantially more students and postdoctoral researchers while attendance by other job types remained fairly constant. GENDER-DIVERSE ATTENDANCE: the 2018-2019 in-person conferences were attended by 1 gender-queer and 0 transgender scientists, the 2020 virtual conference by 8 and 2, and the authors themselves note this increase in REPORTED attendance may partly reflect reporting rather than participation. CARBON: 'the cumulative footprints of the more than 7000 attendees to 2020 ICLR, AAS, and NAMS VCs (1.07 tonnes CO2e) was comparable to the average footprint of a single' in-person attendee. SCALE: the 2020 ICLR, originally scheduled for Ethiopia, drew n = 4,980. HOW TO USE IT: as the clearest measured case that mediation widens access, with three qualifications stated every time, that the comparison is observational and across years, that the organisers were among the authors, and that the Asian attendance result shows the gain is a design choice rather than a property of screens.
[ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT READ AT SOURCE at a public repository: the abstract, the results, the figure legends and the competing-interests statement were read, and THE SUPPLEMENTARY TABLES WERE NOT READ] Skiles, M., Yang, E., Reshef, O., Robalino Munoz, D., Cintron, D., Lind, M. L., Rush, A., Perez Calleja, P., Nerenberg, R., Armani, A., Faust, K., & Kumar, M. (2022). 'Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms.' Nature Sustainability 5, 149-156. doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2, online December 2021, in the February 2022 issue. SKILES FIRST AUTHOR, Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, confirmed on the manuscript byline. COMPETING INTERESTS DECLARED IN THE MANUSCRIPT AND MANDATORY IN ANY CITATION: several co-authors were organisers of the conferences analysed. THE MEASURED ACCESS CASE. Natural experiment: science and engineering conferences that moved online in 2020, compared with their own in-person editions from 2015 to 2019, on cost, gender, career stage and geographic location. ATTENDANCE: 'the audiences were approximately 40% to 120% larger than the historical average for IPCs'. COST AS THE PROPOSED MECHANISM: compared with United States attendees, 'the average researcher from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania paid between 90% to 210% more to attend NAMS IPCs', and the cost of attendance was 'on average between 80% to 250% of their country's annual per capita gross domestic product, compared to approximately 3% of per capita GDP for US participants'. TIME ZONES DECIDE WHO GAINS, AND THIS IS THE SHARPEST DETAIL: the 2020 virtual conference ran synchronous live talks in a United States time zone, and 'attendance from Europe and the Middle East increased by 102% and 76%, respectively, when compared to the 2015-2019 NAMS IPC average', while attendance from Asia, where sessions fell around or past midnight local time, did not rise. GENDER: women made up larger fractions of delegations at the 2020 virtual conferences than at the in-person ones, with a larger percentage increase for female than male scientists at two conferences, and after the 2020 conference was announced as virtual, 37 per cent of submitted abstracts came from female researchers. CAREER STAGE: the 2020 virtual conference was attended by substantially more students and postdoctoral researchers while attendance by other job types remained fairly constant. GENDER-DIVERSE ATTENDANCE: the 2018-2019 in-person conferences were attended by 1 gender-queer and 0 transgender scientists, the 2020 virtual conference by 8 and 2, and the authors themselves note this increase in REPORTED attendance may partly reflect reporting rather than participation. CARBON: 'the cumulative footprints of the more than 7000 attendees to 2020 ICLR, AAS, and NAMS VCs (1.07 tonnes CO2e) was comparable to the average footprint of a single' in-person attendee. SCALE: the 2020 ICLR, originally scheduled for Ethiopia, drew n = 4,980. HOW TO USE IT: as the clearest measured case that mediation widens access, with three qualifications stated every time, that the comparison is observational and across years, that the organisers were among the authors, and that the Asian attendance result shows the gain is a design choice rather than a property of screens.
Written from the aCCEPTED MANUSCRIPT READ AT SOURCE at a public repository: the abstract, the results, the figure legends and the competing-interests statement were read, and THE SUPPLEMENTARY TABLES WERE NOT READ.
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Skiles, M., Yang, E., Reshef, O., Robalino Munoz, D., Cintron, D., Lind, M. L., Rush, A., Perez Calleja, P., Nerenberg, R., Armani, A., Faust, K., & Kumar, M. (2022). Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms. Nature Sustainability, 5, 149-156. doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2